Nuclear landscapes

Abstract

This article brings together the geographic literature on nuclear topics, and draws out the geographical dimensions of broader scholarship on ‘nuclearity’, to consider the premise of a nuclear landscape, and to offer a partial history of such landscapes. Places such as New Mexico’s Trinity Site have become iconic, at least in the United States, and a study of nuclear landscapes must consider the cultural force of spectacular weapons tests and related origin stories. But critical scholars have also looked beyond and below the distractions of mushroom clouds, to additional and alternative landscapes that are obscured by secrecy and relative banality.